I've reported elsewhere about the extremely negative experience I've had with Telstra's NextG wireless Internet. In April 2009 I received a message from an unlikely source: an ex-consultant for this service (they appear to use the word “consultant” where I'd use the more descriptive term “technical support”). With his permission, I've repeated the message almost verbatim, but I've removed his name and location.

Just wanted to let you know that I read your article on Telstra, it was exceptionally well structured and it's about time someone published such comprehensive information about the poor products and services they offer.

I used to work for Telstra between 2005-2006, I was a wireless broadband consultant when they just starting launching the support centers for the product and I was there for the launch of their NextG mobile data products that you had all the issues with.

There was about 200 people in my center where I was working and Telstra had rolled out the NextG product without training a single staff member on the product, in fact, Telstra generally rolls out before they train, it was a habit that caused me many a frustration. The NextG mobile product on first rollout and for 6 months after was failing 9 out of 10 times with customers coming through to get the fault fixed. Telstra forgot to supply the consultants with the access and material they needed to fix the problem and as a result alot of customers had to wait months for any results. On the frontline dealing with customers it was a horrible time to be working there, management would make bad decisions and hang the consultants out to take the beating.

The whole thing was further interrupted by a system migration that was taking place to a broadband management system called Moby, which in my opinion was the worst decision they ever made, it was an in house programmed system, and when I say in house, programmed by indian consultants. The programmers were not familiar with company process for calls or the consultant position and as you would expect if you asked a baker to build a car, it didn't work correctly, alot of customers there also without service because of a very badly planned migration to a platform I could have programmed in a day.

When I started I was allocated a total of 1250 seconds to deal with a call and no more, they are very statistics oriented rather than customer service oriented which is something that really drove me insane. I ended up leaving Telstra in late 2006 after I had enough of the internal rubbish of faulty systems, processes, call times. The funny thing is, alot of consultants are still in the same boat and nothing has changed within the walls of Telstra, not in my location anyway, which is a major broadband centre.

I just thought I would give you this little bit more information to give you further insight into the “Big T”, most customers were always baffled as to why something so simple took so long, well the above is mainly why.